Welcome to the sixth season of The T Dog Media Blog – and a new home!
Yours truly has moved the blog to a new site at my own web domain at https://www.tdogmedia.com and switched the platform from Blogger to WordPress. It’s cleaner, easier to use, and just flat out looks better for the reader (that means no more ugly orange-gray backgrounds or blue backgrounds with white lettering.)
All 2,100+ posts archived back to September 18, 2006 has been transferred to the new site (some time-sensitive posts – e.g., Week 6 NFL TV coverage maps in 2007 were deleted and were not transferred.)
If you are still using the old http://www.thetdogblog.blogspot.com address, it will simply re-direct you to the new site here after ten seconds or so. As of today, posting on Blogger has been discontinued and comment sections on the old site have been shut down. Links in archived stories linking back to the old site are being fixed and replaced with ones from this site.
As you can tell, yours truly hasn’t been posting much because of the work put in designing the new site – not to mention transferring all those posts and re-tagging each and every one – a process that took five long weeks – something I would never do again, believe me.
So why the move from Blogger to WordPress? Well for one thing, I wanted my own platform to provide the blog – that is, my own web domain name and site as opposed to piggybacking off of Blogger’s.
WordPress offers more features than Blogger – not to mention a much better mobile interface where yours truly can post on the go. The T Dog Media Blog will now be easier to read on your iPhone, iPod Touch (which I have), Android, or WebOS device with an simple mobile interface. In addition, WordPress offers me an opportunity to offer my material in on a platform that doesn’t really feel like a blog.
I made it easier for you to find the subjects and stories you want to read about. In addition to the tagging of posts, they are now categorized into thirteen subjects at the top of the page (below the header.) So, if you want to find posts on Chicago Media or the Think Tanks I wrote, just click on the subject on the top of the page and it take you to all posts dating back to 2006 on the matter, with the most recent post first.
In addition, the Twitter badge on the new T Dog Media site is far better than the one used on Blogger. Here, you can see my Snoopy (or a retweeter’s) avatar, and you can reply, retweet, or favorite a tweet right from the page.
With the move, T Dog’s Media Friends are being fully updated with new links, including TV Media Insights and Isaacs on Chicago Media blog. More links will be added soon.
In the future, I will be adding new features, such as a YouTube video page and possibly a podcast – but that’s a little bit down the road.
And I’m not done tinkering with the new site – there will be a few minor tweaks made here and there made in the next few weeks, including the addition of a Facebook widget.
Finally, you no longer have to go through a verification process for commenting that I enabled on Blogger to keep spammers out – WordPress has a stronger system that handles the e-junk. However, the old rules still apply when commenting – they must be relevant to the subject matter (if you want to praise or criticize me for the article or the blog… well, you can do that too.)
A lot has changed since I began this blog back five years ago – some for the better (Twitter, Facebook, Chicago Blackhawks), some for the worse (the economy, WFLD-TV’s newscasts, many Chicago neighborhoods, Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, journalism, Netflix), some things have stayed the same – unfortunately (The Cubs, NBC, Jim Belushi, Mancow, etc.) and some have left us (Q101, the original WNUA, Borders Bookstores, Law & Order, Bernie Mac, John Callaway.) And in case you haven’t noticed, Oprah Winfrey doesn’t have a daily talk show strip anymore.
But one thing is for sure – you can always count on yours truly to give his twisted take on the media business – in Chicago, around the country, and around the world (mainly Canada.) And as always, I thank you for your support and I hope you like the new look.
And now that the new site has launched, it’s time to get back to something I’ve haven’t done much for the last two months – writing! It’s a new era here at The T Dog Media Blog – onward and upward.
Terence Henderson